The 8th edition of the Arquiteturas Film Festival, postponed to 2021 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, would have occurred last week in Lisbon. However, the festival announced full information on the selection of film programs on its website ( http://arquiteturasfilmfestival.com/program-2020 / ).

The theme is Bodies Out of Space and aims to reflect on the social construction of space connected to a thread that circulates within its own domination narratives. Identity narratives that our bodies are often forced into.

Architecture works with administrative, economic, political and structural powers that control, segregate and colonize, actively mapping the space territories inhabited by our bodies. This is not just a grim interpretation of the discipline of architecture, it is a request to actively reflect on our responsibility as spectators and visitors, as we traverse these labyrinths of inequality as direct descendants of the exploration of space and bodies.

Sofia Mourato, director of the festival, invited journalist and producer Marta Lança to curate the program of films, masterclass and specific activities regarding the country invited to the festival which this year would be Angola.

“Every day we wake up in a Luanda of resistance. The confluence of times and regimes is visible in colonial architecture, from slave houses to tropical modernism, from soft Portuguese to neoliberalism, through the Asian skyscrapers of the new centralities. Any Angolan would make an unmissable biopic. A country with little film production that is a hotbed of wonderful stories waiting to be revealed by a camera. ”- Marta Lança

In the meantime, the Arquiteturas team decided that this break would be a great opportunity to remember the last seven editions of the festival and provide viewers worldwide with a retrospective of the festival with free films. Each film will be released every Friday, until the edition next year, which will take place at São Jorge cinema from the 1st to the 6th of June, and can be watched for a week. This initiative aims to provide visibility to films and directors and to thank them for their contribution to the initiation of many necessary discussions initiated at the festival through the stories portrayed in the films. Every week, the festival invites, live on Instagram, the filmmakers for an informal conversation with the festival director. These conversations will be announced through the festival's Instagram and Facebook pages.

The first film in the retrospective is Misleading Innocence (tracing what a bridge can do) and will be available for free viewing from 12 to 19 June at www. architecturasfilmfestival.com

Misleading Innocence by Francesco Garutti and Shahab Mihandoust, 2014, Canada, 50 ’

This film, designed by Francesco Garutti, directed by Shahab Mihandoust, and produced by the Canadian Center for Architecture (CCA), explores the history of planning and policy for a series of viaducts on Long Island, in the USA, commissioned in the decades 1920s and 1930s by Robert Moses.

“How and to what degree can a project’s intentions be deliberately concealed? What are the deviously designed effects and the unplanned political consequences of the agency of the artifacts that surround us? ” - Francesco Garutti
www.cca.qc.ca/misleading-innocence